On Wed, Aug 29, 2007 at 04:19:46PM -0500, Norm Jacobs wrote:
> The hald-addon-network-discovery module could be used to detect other types
> of network attached devices, like scanners or storage, but it is
> specifically looking for printers. The hald-probe-network-printer module
> is tied to printers and only looks for printer specific data on the device
> it's probing.
Okay. Isn't it strange, then, that you're assigning the Printer Management
profile to the SMF service instances when those instances could be
discovering things other than Printers?
Would "Device Management" be more appropriate? Or would it be preferable
to restructure the service so that the device types are the instance names,
and the discovery protocols are properties on those instances? (Or
something like that.)
>> How is this expected to be used in an environment like Sun's, where
>> network printers are managed by an IT department and added to the NIS
>> maps?
>
> It's not. In a managed environment, like the SWAN, you would probably turn
> this off and use the network name service (or discovery method specific to
> print queues) to locate existing queues on the network
You said in your reply to Jim that the service would be off by default.
How would a user in a non-managed environment know to turn it on? Is there
anything you can do to make this more automagic? Maybe based on whether
the printers map is empty?
> We are looking at augmenting the discovery of print queues to support a
> more ad hoc mechanism separate from this project.
Cool.
> The printers are uniquely identified by a serial number when one can be
> retrieved from it. Some of my earlier prototype code generated a unique ID
> based on the MAC address when a serial number wasn't available from the
> device. I had originally used this unique id instead of {addr} in the HAL
> device tree and switched to {addr}. I can see some value in using
> something more static than IP addr like MAC addr.
If you can uniquely identify by serial number in some large percentage of
the printers out there, that's probably good enough -- I bet people are
more likely to recognize a printer by IP address than MAC address, if they
need to get down to it.
Danek
